Public Policy is social agreement written down as a universal guide for social action. We at The Policy ThinkShop share information so others can think and act in the best possible understanding of "The Public Interest."

The Polity ThinkShop brings you this important report on the State of our American State

Have unions been dealt yet another blow, now ironically by the well intentioned ACA reform?

If the federal government mandates that business and individuals obtain insurance is this setting a president for the federal government to regulate and mandate worker gains without the use of union muscle?

These are provocative questions, at least for people who still remember the sacrifices that were made to create unions and the horrible conditions that preceded them.

“Last week’s vote by workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tenn. plant against joining the United Auto Workers union — despite VW’s tacit encouragement — points up the challenges faced by U.S. organized labor. Even though unions retain much public support, the share of American workers who actually belong to one has been falling for decades and is at its lowest level since the Great Depression.

In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in June 2013, about half (51%) of Americans said they had favorable opinions of labor unions, versus 42% who said they had unfavorable opinions about them. That was the highest favorability rating since 2007, though still below the 63% who said they were favorably disposed toward unions in 2001. In a separate 2012 survey, 64% of Americans agreed that unions were necessary to protect working people (though 57% also agreed that unions had “too much power”).”

Given today’s liberalization of news information, few bastions remain where one can sift through the cacophony of media bites and babble to form an educated

opinion or assess an educated risk. The Economist is failing in this regard on the American debate on healthcare reform–The Affordable Care Act.

Healthcare reform in America is a struggle for power and wealth at the increasingly small American top and a life and death struggle for most of the people below.

If we loose respected journals like the Economist in these times of mass information as intellectual fodder for the masses, we will be left without an intellectual meeting place where concerned minds can gather to contemplate benchmarks and directions. Regarding The Affordable Care Act debate in America, not only has the current president failed to sell and communicate the important of ACA implementation, he has once again betrayed the needs of the many for the expedient and self serving calculus of preserving power and status by appealing to an imaginary center–not too different here from the pragmatic Bill Clinton on Welfare Reform. But we digress.

The Economist has been a reliable source for decades as it has proven to be an \”objective\” source of information on the complex world stage. It\’s recent coverage of the American scene, however, requires vision and focus if it is going to support the journal\’s reputation as one of the few sources that our college professors respected that were not refereed journals.

The headline of the above story, \”The Obamacare sofware mess,\” is as semantically charged as it is irrelevant to any of the public policy issues raised by a serious American healthcare market debate addressing the important issue of how healthcare is distributed, facilitated or accessed by people in need of healthcare services.

Semantics: The term \”Obamacare\” plays directly into the divisive and charged narrative that portrays the healthcare debate in America as a tug of war between an \”evil and un-American\” president and American freedom. The framing of the current full court press, by conservatives, to obstruct the American president, at all at all costs, and the popular will of a democracy, is akin to saying that Churchill failed to stop Hitler sooner or to foresee the costs of settling with Stalin because of his neonatally determined speech impediment. It is academically irresponsible and intellectually dishonest, at least on the pages of this fine journal, to stain this usually intellectually rigorous space with narratives that are more appropriate in pop news sources that entertain people who are looking to reinforce their own deeply held biases and/or myopic political world views.

The Economics has been a leading world source of factual information relevant to the business of serious policy discourse and sober business leadership.

The foregoing comments are submitted on behalf of the Policy ThinkShop blogging team.

As a not for profit, non partisan source of policy analysis and conversation, we rely heavily on sources like the Economist to promote reason and thoughtful

conversation on all things public policy….

Please reconsider your use of the American public policy discourse and reflect on your use of language to add to and further support our current cacophony of obstructionism and self promoting pragmatism in the pursuit of popular power and further public policy noise…

Can modern government police itself? Has the American government gotten too big and too powerful in the age of big data, billion dollar budgets and heated global competition for its centenarian constitution? Are we too quick to personify the bureaucratic colossus and expect it to respond like an ethical and nimble organization? Have citizens become too powerful, overwhelmed and confused when given access information and the ability to disseminate it to the four corners of the earth in one instant? Technology and humanity have finally reached a turning point. Human possibilities are magnified immensely by technology for bad and for good.

What is America’s relationship to the world as it looks out on the horizon of international intrigue and what is its relationship inward toward its citizens’ civil rights?

“THERE was something surreal, in a Kafkaesque sort of way, about Barack Obama’s press conference on August 9th. Aiming to ease concern over the government’s surveillance programmes, the president announced reforms that seem both obvious and overdue. Then he criticised the man whose actions set those reforms in motion.

The president’s proposals include creating a group of outside experts to assess the government’s balancing of security and privacy. (When in doubt, create a task force.) More substantially, Mr Obama said he would like to change the proceedings of the secret court that approves electronic spying and interprets counterterrorism laws. Whereas now the court only hears the government’s side of any argument, the president wants to see an opposing viewpoint represented.

Mr Obama also said he would work with Congress to create safeguards against abuse of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect data about Americans’ phone calls. The administration will release the legal rationale for its snooping …”

When asked “Please tell me how you would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in these different fields — very high, high, average, low, or very low?” people placed nurses, pharmacists and medical doctors at the very top as most trust worthy. At the bottom of the list, they ranked lowest in trust worthiness, Car salesman as least trust worthy and members of congress second to least trust worthy. HMO managers and Senators were also in the lowest quartile, along with Lawyers and Governors.

It is no wonder, then, that we are having such a difficult time implementing healthcare reform. It seems people value, need and trust healthcare and its direct practitioners, but are leery of politicians and bureaucrats.

Ironically, it can be said that healthcare reform has been designed and promoted by politicians. No wonder then!

After years of the seemingly inadvertent fomentation of distrust among its polity (the growing role of the U.S. government and the Vietnam war, for example), technology has opened up a potentially ubiquitous eavesdropping by the federal government that is eerily reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984. It does not seem sinister, though, since it thus far appears to be the outcome of an aggressive privatization policy that was probably compelled by the rapid implementation of our most recent wars. Nevertheless, Americans have the right to ask question, remain vigilant and demand answers if not reform.

“A majority of Americans – 56% – say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts. An even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism.

And despite the insistence by the president and other senior officials that only “metadata,” such as phone numbers and email addresses, is being collected, 63% think the government is also gathering information about the content of communications – with 27% believing the government has listened to or read their phone calls and emails.”

New York and New Jersey flexed their political muscle in order to get Congress to move on making good the promise that victims of Hurricane Sandy would be taken care of. In these times of budget cuts, budget deficits and tax battles on the Hill, real political muscle prevailed as these two important states were able to move an embattled federal political elite.

“The measure is the first, and least controversial, portion of a much larger aid package sought by the affected states to help homeowners and local governments recover costs associated with the storm. The House has pledged to take up the balance of the aid package on Jan. 15.”

President Obama will follow through on the real politic as bipartisanship hopes yield to political realties…

“The House passed the insurance measure 354 to 67; it then cleared the Senate by unanimous consent. President Obama is expected to sign the measure into law.”

The London Economist provides some sober analysis on the Republican meltdown that represents the Presidential Election of 2012. The Republican disconnect between the young, women and Latinos could spell a new era of demographic consequences that are now clearly irreversible and that will mandate Republican philosophical change that may not be possible for another generation. Millionaire money, gerrymandering and voter suppression is clearly not enough to the blossoming diversity and generational succession that is now apparent in the “NEW AMERICAN ELECTORATE.”

“FOR conservatives casting about for comfort, there are plenty of plausible reasons to dismiss talk of a crisis. Mitt Romney could have run a better campaign. He reacted slowly when Barack Obama defined him as a heartless plutocrat, and flip-flopped on policies so frequently that even campaign allies struggled to keep …”

This Economist article is only one soul-searching conservative attempt to explain the current state of the Republican mind. It may take Conservatives, Tea Party stalwarts and Right Wingers another decade to figure it out. By then, the NEW AMERICAN ELECTORATE may have moved on. America is moving forward right past the right, its billionaires and its antiquated vision of “a real america”.

The elegant, if left leaning, New Yorker magazine brings us an interesting article surveying the Obama administration’s per and post election leadership and an interesting review of the pending election … Must read fr those wanting to stay entertained and informed in these trying times on the East Cost …

“Bush left behind an America in dire condition and with a degraded reputation. On Inauguration Day, the United States was in a downward financial spiral brought on by predatory lending, legally sanctioned greed and pyramid schemes, an economic policy geared to the priorities and the comforts of what soon came to be called “the one per cent,” and deregulation that began before the Bush Presidency. In 2008 alone, more than two and a half million jobs were lost—up to three-quarters of a million jobs a month. The gross domestic product was shrinking at a rate of nine per cent. Housing prices collapsed. Credit markets collapsed. The stock market collapsed—and, with it, the retirement prospects of millions. Foreclosures and evictions were ubiquitous; whole neighborhoods and towns emptied. The automobile industry appeared to be headed for bankruptcy. Banks as large as Lehman Brothers were dead, and other banks were foundering. It was a crisis of historic dimensions and global ramifications. However skillful the management in Washington, the slump was bound to last longer than any since the Great Depression.”

A new front opened Friday in efforts to reshape how the federal government implements President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul now that the Supreme Court has ruled to keep the law in place. Employers, insurers, hospitals, drug makers and others are angling for an advantage as the government writes the regulations and sets the policies that will bring the law to life (Radnofsky and Weaver, 7/1).

Los Angeles Times: Healthcare Law Still Faces Obstacles

President Obama’s healthcare law emerged from its bruising two-year legal ordeal largely intact, with its primary goal of guaranteeing all Americans health security still standing. The Supreme Court, however, is only the first of several daunting obstacles the law must clear (Levey, 7/1).

The New York Times’ Economic View: Giving Health Care A Chance To Evolve

When the court affirmed the law’s constitutionality on Thursday, many forecasters were astonished. The ruling came by the slimmest of margins and was defended, in places, by deeply flawed economic reasoning. But it has paved the way for an orderly rehabilitation of America’s gravely dysfunctional health care system (Frank, 6/30).

The Washington Post: Washington’s Winners And Losers From The Supreme Court’s Health-Care Ruling

The Supreme Court last week upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature domestic achievement aimed at expanding health care coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans. The court upheld both the requirement that all individuals buy insurance, and the expansion of Medicaid, a joint federal-state insurance program for the poor — as long as the federal government does not threaten to withhold states’ Medicaid funding if states choose not to expand. Here is a look how the decision affects the local business world (Ho, 7/1).

HealthyCal: Court Ruling Opens Door To Big Changes In Health Care

The easiest way to understand the coming change is this: The current business model of the health insurance industry consists of avoiding risk. The new model will instead force insurance companies to compete by offering the best service (Weintraub, 7/1).

Now that the health care law has gotten the green light from the U.S. Supreme Court, business owners across Minnesota are running the numbers to see how the law’s requirements will affect their businesses in the coming years. The law affects employers in different ways, depending on their size (Crosby, 6/30).

Market Watch: Insurer Stocks Continue To Fall After Ruling

In the wake of a landmark Supreme Court ruling that reverberated throughout the sector, commercial insurers started sliding again in Friday trading despite a broad market rally. These insurers, which had stumbled from the shock of the court’s decision Thursday to uphold President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul legislation, rebounded when trading opened. But as the session wore on, they slid into negative territory (Britt, 6/29).

In seemingly endless times of “trash talk” that led to an improbable and unpopular political victory, the newly minted president clamors: “Now arrives the hour of action.” Fleeting relief comes to the nation as the transition […]

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